Even the most reclusive person cannot escape relationships. The most important relationships will always be with yourself and with God. If there is no you, relationships become empty, scary, and defensive.
It’s fun to think back to the first, second, and third years of your life. Even if you don’t have conscious memories of those years, you can probably reconstruct some of the things you do know into some kind of idea of what your first relationships must have been like.
Did you have both parents? Do you even know who both parents are? Where did you live? Farm? City? Country? What was your dwelling place? House? Apartment? Street? Were you wanted? Planned? Were you welcomed by one person or many people? What kind of caregivers were a part of your infancy? What happened to you during the first three years of your life has everything to do with this therepeutic process we call relationship.
Responding to care or lack of care not only affects early learning to talk, walk, and react, it also affects the development of perceptions about ourselves and others. Most of us formed distorted perceptions of ourselves and others from the beginning. Identifying and sorting out early perceptions becomes a lifetime task in relationship.
